‘can Lego be an effective medium for typography?’
following his fondness for modular-type design, the designer, creative director, and author craig ward, unveils an intricate typography series made of LEGO bricks. through his latest project dubbed ‘brik font’, the artist explores the limitations of typeface design, adding a whimsical touch to regular letters. some typefaces from the ‘brik font’ series consist of a thin, curved design while others a bold, stencil-like style. the british-born artist also plays with rounded and curved bricks and other times he gives the impression of rasterized results.
‘creativity thrives on restriction, and the LEGO building system is a testament to that. very few things have yet to be created in LEGO in some way, but the nuances of type design tend to be compromised,’ he mentioned.
all images courtesy of brik font
exploring the nuance of type design
each of craig ward‘s pioneering typographic works is described with a short caption, that shows the references of the specific type of design. ‘I’m not 100% sure about what constitutes success in this undertaking — whether it’s type that overcomes the limitations of the medium or whether it’s type that embraces them. resolution is always going to be an issue when dealing with subtle curves, I’ve played with antialiasing type and the results are pretty interesting,’ said craig, tackling this issue by using techniques from computer graphics in an analog environment.
as he mentioned in an instagram post, ‘part of the idea behind this project is to create new modular typefaces, the templates for which I’ll be selling as downloadable PDFs through an etsy store for like the price of a coffee or something. this is one of my first: a 5 line condensed stencil alphabet, 55 characters in all: a-z, 0-9 and some punctuation’.
‘did a lot of hand wringing on this one but I don’t think I could lose a single tile without compromising legibility’.
‘my first complete alphabet is this 10 line condensed sans. the template with a character set comprising a-z, A-Z, 0-9 plus some punctuation is available via the link in my bio.’
anti-aliased 36pt helvetica neue light and bold
‘nice goofy 14 line slab serif’.
‘play’
1/9
zoom in ‘play’
‘B is for blackletter. in the textura style if we’re being specific. these are kind of the OG’s of modular type with letters broken down into consistently replicable strokes to aid with the copying of manuscripts and texts by hand before the printing press arrived’.
‘quick two line ampersand (&) using the dots system tiles. fun playing with scale and shooting this stuff with a macro lens.’
‘helveticish…? sortakinda? working on an 8/9 line swiss sans that retains the proportions of helvetica neue light.’
‘I’ve worked out wim crouwel’s new alphabet at two scales. arguably it’s more successful / accurate with the 45° tiles with a two stud stroke width, but this one is more manageable in terms of size and still holds up I think.’
project info:
name: brik font
artist: craig ward
christina petridou I designboom
nov 02, 2021
You must be logged in to post a comment.